Professional Documents
Culture Documents
B L A E T Z , editor
Women’s Experimental Cinema
critical frameworks
Women’s Experimental Cinema
b
R O B I N B L A E T Z , editor
Women’s Experimental Cinema
critical frameworks
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Noël Carroll’s article ‘‘Moving and Moving:
Minimalism to Lives of Performers’’
originally appeared in Millennium Film
Journal 35–36 (2000). Reprinted with
permission.
Duke University Press gratefully
acknowledges the support of the American
Association of University Women, which
provided funds toward the production of
this book.
b
and in memory of
Jay Leyda
Contents
b
ix Acknowledgments
1 ROBIN BLAETZ Introduction: Women’s Experimental Cinema:
∏
Critical Frameworks
20 MELISSA RAGONA ∏ Swing and Sway: Marie Menken’s Filmic Events
45 PAUL ARTHUR Different/Same/Both/Neither: The Polycentric
∏
Cinema of Joyce Wieland
67 CHRIS HOLMLUND Excavating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory
∏
Frames: Signature, Translation, Resonance, and Gunvor Nelson’s
Films
89 NOËL CARROLL ∏ Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives
of Performers
103 M . M . S E R R A A N D K A T H R Y N R A M E Y ∏ Eye/Body: The Cinematic
Paintings of Carolee Schneemann
127 ARA OSTERWEIL ‘‘Absently Enchanted’’: The Apocryphal, Ecstatic
∏
Cinema of Barbara Rubin
152 R O B E R T A . H A L L E R ∏ Amy Greenfield: Film, Dynamic Movement,
and Transformation
167 CHUCK KLEINHANS ∏ Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History
188 MARIA PRAMAGGIORE ∏ Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography
211 ROBIN BLAETZ ∏ Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller
239 MARY ANN DOANE ∏ In the Ruins of the Image:
The Work of Leslie Thornton
263 MAUREEN TURIM ∏ Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the
Films of Abigail Child
290 Peggy’s Playhouse: Contesting the
W I L L I A M C . W E E S ∏
Modernist Paradigm
312 JANET CUTLER ∏ Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules
339 KATHLEEN MCHUGH The Experimental ‘‘Dunyementary’’:
∏
A Cinematic Signature Effect
360 SCOTT MACDONALD Women’s Experimental Cinema:
∏
Some Pedagogical Challenges
383 Appendix: Film Distribution
385 Bibliography
401 Contributors
405 Index
viii ∏ CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
b
Although writers have provided individual thanks, certain names and
institutions arise repeatedly and deserve special mention, including: An-
thology Film Archives, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema, Mil-
lennium Film Journal , P. Adams Sitney, Scott MacDonald, M. M. Serra,
and Robert Haller. This project benefited from the generosity of the
American Association of University Women in the form of a Summer
Research Grant and from a number of Faculty Research Grants from
Mount Holyoke College. I am grateful to all the writers who have been
part of this project for their enthusiasm and commitment and for their
substantial and passionate work. I want also to express my gratitude to
my colleagues at Mount Holyoke College, particularly Elizabeth Young,
Tom Wartenberg, Paul Staiti, Ajay Sinha, and Jenny Perlin, and to a
number of others, including Cosmas Demetriou, Chris Holmlund, Kath-
leen McHugh, Adrienne McLean, James Meyer, Gordon Spencer-Blaetz,
Ann Steuernagel, Patty White, Ken Wissoker, and two most helpful
anonymous readers.
ROBIN BLAETZ
Introduction:
Women’s Experimental Cinema
Critical Frameworks
b
Experimental cinema has always been an art form in which women have
excelled. As far back as 1942, when Maya Deren made the groundbreak-
ing Meshes of an Afternoon with two people and a 16mm camera, count-
less women working in small-scale film and video have been creating a
deep and wide-ranging body of film. Little of this work has entered into
the many general histories that have been written about the cinema, but
this is the fate of most avant-garde and experimental film (terms that I am
using interchangeably here). Indeed, the dominance of narrative film-
making and feature-length film has shaped criticism and scholarly work
as much as it has production. While there are many experimental films
that deserve increased attention, this anthology seeks to redress the ab-
sence of fifteen women artists through a series of critical essays that offer
contextualized readings of their work.
In order to understand the reasons for recovering this work in par-
ticular, one must go back to the end of the 1960s and the beginning of
the 1970s, when there was a window of opportunity for the assimila-
tion of the rich field of women’s experimental cinema into the wider
arena of cinema studies. For this brief moment, scholars paid attention to
both avant-garde film and the films that women were producing in ever-
greater numbers in relation to feminism and increased opportunities for
women in general. What happened during this period to obscure the
presence of the women who had been working for the two previous
decades and frustrate those artists seeking to further their careers in the
years to follow? In order to get a sense of this historical moment and the
causes of the lost opportunity, this introduction begins by focusing on
several film festivals held during this period.
Certain male experimental filmmakers have received a narrow but
steady stream of attention, with P. Adams Sitney’s influential Visionary
Film: The American Avant-Garde of 1974 firmly establishing a small
group of artists in the history of the medium. Sitney’s book, which was
begun in 1969, was written during an extraordinarily rich time in the
annals of the American avant-garde. The 1960s was a decade of growing
interest in experimental film, particularly through the forum of the five
International Experimental Film Competitions held in Belgium. ∞ The
festival was known for discovering new artists rather than furthering the
careers of those who had established themselves by showing their work in
previous years. However, the experimental film festival was no differ-
ent than any other in that it remained a largely male preserve, which
launched the careers of few women.≤ Although in the final competition in
1975 there were just twelve films out of seventy-four by women, no
women on the initial jury, and one female judge out of five, women
managed to win four of the ten prizes. ≥ By the time the festival had run its
course, many of the once struggling male avant-garde artists who had
achieved a degree of fame in Belgium had found jobs teaching production
in film studies programs in colleges and universities in the United States
and no longer needed either the attention or the prize money.∂ Although
a few women filmmakers had done well in the festivals, they received
neither the critical consideration nor the jobs that accompanied it, and
the field of avant-garde cinema was institutionalized as a thoroughly
masculine one called the American avant-garde.
While scholarship about experimental film dealt largely with the newly
evolved canon throughout the 1980s, Sitney had begun to reconsider his
work. In fact he noted in each new version of Visionary Film, which
reappeared in 1979 and 2002, that his lack of research in relation to the
work of key women filmmakers had partially motivated the revised edi-
tion. For the second edition, he examined Deren and Marie Menken at
greater length, and in the third, a longer list includes Yvonne Rainer, Su
Friedrich, and Abigail Child. While this new attention was welcome, it
was not able to make up for the initial elision. With some major excep-
tions, the women’s work was more or less plugged in to a structure built
2 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
around the notion of the romantic artist, and women’s films seem to be
peripheral to a tradition that had been defined as male.∑
The chance to become known and supported as an experimental film-
maker through university employment had diminished for women by the
end of the 1960s. However, the early 1970s saw the birth of a remarkable
number of film journals and festivals devoted to women’s cinema inter-
nationally. The first of the seven issues of the feminist journal Women and
Film appeared in 1972, along with special issues on the topic in both Film
Library Quarterly and Take One. ∏ In June 1972, the First International
Festival of Women’s Films was held in New York City, followed two
months later by ‘‘The Women’s Event’’ at the Edinburgh International
Film Festival. The next summer saw a festival of Women’s Cinema at the
National Theater in London and a Women and Film festival in Toronto.
On one level, these festivals were quite similar; each one exhibited a
transhistorical accumulation of feature, documentary, and experimental
film by women, from the silent period to the present, sometimes divided
into rather amorphous categories such as ‘‘Eroticism and Exploitation’’ or
‘‘Women: Myth and Reality’’ in the New York festival.π The intention is
clear. The attendee is to be amazed and inspired by the plethora of
women’s work and the degree to which the films and their makers have
been excluded from the field. The looseness of the programming was
matched by the variety of discussions that were planned. In New York, for
example, forums were held to consider the image of women in film,
scriptwriting, women in television, programming and distribution, edit-
ing, acting, directing, making documentaries, the question of a female
film aesthetic, and the image of men in film.∫ The struggle to articulate
whether women would be best served by analyzing the long history of
misogynist imagery and women’s attempts to work within the classical
Hollywood system or by making images of themselves from scratch per-
vaded this period of feminist film studies.
Yet even at this early date, critics of the festival such as filmmaker Joan
Braderman observed that the haphazard collection of films presented
what she called a misguided attempt to find a ‘‘female film sensibility.’’Ω
The decontextualization of the films had the effect of making the films
appear to be anomalous as works of art in a male tradition and skewing
their reception toward ‘‘women’s art’’ rather than simply art. The films
chosen for the festivals were often feature films by the likes of Doro-
thy Arzner, Mai Zetterling, or Agnes Varda, which had sometimes been
briefly noted in film history books but rarely studied, and documentary
INTRODUCTION ∏ 3
films about women and women’s history that had obvious appeal. Al-
though there seems to have been quite a bit of experimental work shown
in the New York festival, including a film or two by Deren, Menken,
Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley, Chick Strand, and others, only one of
the fifteen programs was labeled ‘‘Avant-Garde (Experimental) Films.’’
B. Ruby Rich has written about these early women’s film festivals in her
memoir about her experiences with the feminist film movement in this
period. She excuses what appears in retrospect to be arbitrariness as a
research project and mission to rescue from oblivion the many unknown
films otherwise absent from film history.∞≠ As might have been expected,
the films shown and discussed during these festivals found their way into
the college courses and books about women’s film that were emerging at
this time and began to form a canon. The minimal presence of experi-
mental film at the festivals guaranteed that documentary films about
contemporaneous issues (some of which were experimental in form) and
films made by struggling foremothers would dominate the field of femi-
nist film studies.
None of the films screened at any festival had as great an influence on
film studies and on the fate of women’s experimental cinema as the
discussions held at ‘‘The Women’s Event’’ at the Edinburgh Festival of
1972. At these seminars, some open only to women, scholars such as
Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey began to introduce the psychoanalyti-
cally based film theory that would change the direction of the entire field
of film studies.∞∞ Questions proposed in the festival handout laid the
path for years to come. For example, in relation to documentaries about
women, the organizers asked whether the films had offered a critique of
their place in society or merely reflected dominant ideology. Even more
to the point, they raised a series of questions: Are there ‘‘specifically
feminine values which emerge from the work of women directors? Must
women directors totally reject masculine values and invent something
entirely different? Or, conversely, what function does the feminine cri-
tique of ideology have?’’∞≤ In the end, this final query carried the most
weight. The conclusion that films were influential and harmful to women
to the degree that they were structured through invisible editing to satisfy
male desire for visual and literal dominance shifted the attention of femi-
nist scholars from women’s films to films about women. Cinematically
experimental investigation of female subjectivity such as that found in
Deren’s At Land of 1945 began to seem far less compelling than under-
standing the effect on millions of women of Hollywood’s melodramas of
4 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
the same period, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). Few
scholars noted that in describing the far-from-innocent workings of this
style of filmmaking that is so familiar that it appears not to exist at all,
both Mulvey and Johnston call for a countercinema to take its place. ∞≥
It is with this countercinema that Women’s Experimental Cinema:
Critical Frameworks is concerned. The essays commissioned for this vol-
ume are meant to revive attention to a number of films that have fallen
through the cracks of both the history of the American avant-garde and
feminist scholarship. Quite a few of the filmmakers covered are no longer
working, some of them have died, and all deserve the consideration of the
discipline of film studies in order to be understood, appreciated, taught,
and preserved. The writers of the essays in this volume have sought to
present the work of these filmmakers as broadly as possible. To use and
expand the light metaphor used by André Bazin and other film theorists,
in which the theater is a chandelier in comparison to the random aim of
the usher’s flashlight that is cinema, I would hope that this anthology
would function like a lighthouse.∞∂ These essays are both radiant in them-
selves as they guide scholars toward this submerged work but they also
offer a warning of the dangers of failing to pay attention to the fate of this
fragile medium. The ultimate goal of this book is to insert the work of
these less known filmmakers into film history, widely conceived to in-
clude, for example, the American avant-garde, minimalism, or ethnogra-
phy, and also to enrich the definition of feminism in the cinema.
The anthology has a particular interest in filling a lacuna in the history
of experimental film. As the situation now stands, a student using some
of the textbooks in the field might come away thinking that the film-
maker Carolee Schneemann was exclusively an actress and a muse. These
essays intend to suggest the full complexity of Schneemann’s art and that
of the other filmmakers discussed. In addition to expanding the canon of
avant-garde cinema and feminist film, this collection also reveals intrigu-
ing similarities between various women filmmakers who rarely knew
each other but who worked in the evolving historical circumstances that
slowly changed women’s social roles in the second half of the twentieth
century. While the editor and the individual writers wish the book to
encourage its readers to explore beyond its boundaries, this introduction
suggests a number of characteristics common to some of these film-
makers, which differentiate their work from the more familiar films of the
artists who work within the context of feminist theory. These artists who
have received considerable attention, particularly Laura Mulvey, Sally
INTRODUCTION ∏ 5
Potter, Chantal Akerman, and Yvonne Rainer, make films that are directly
related to the scholarly work that deconstructed the patriarchal struc-
tures of the cinema in order to understand its seductive appeal. Except
for a chapter on Rainer’s first film, Lives of Performers (1972) and refer-
ence to her Privilege (1991) in the conclusion, this book contains no new
scholarship about these filmmakers. This introduction seeks to highlight
some of the most obvious of the characteristics common to those film-
makers working outside of feminist theory to provide a point of entry into
the films.
Since the late 1980s, however, ever more writers, including Scott Mac-
Donald, William C. Wees, and Wheeler Winston Dixon, have been con-
sidering women’s cinema in the broader field of avant-garde film history.
In addition, feminist theorists such as E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, and
Judith Mayne have paid attention to certain women artists since the
1970s. More inclusive approaches to the field, which embrace a broader
variety of films, have been written by Lucy Fischer, Lauren Rabinovitz,
B. Ruby Rich, and Alexandra Juhasz. In addition to addressing the work
of some of the filmmakers considered in this anthology, these writers
use analysis, personal reflection, and/or interviews to contextualize the
work in relation to Hollywood film, the social and political context of the
1960s and 1970s, and feminist filmmaking as a broadly defined move-
ment. Recently, the material about certain women filmmakers has begun
to thicken, with entire books and even several volumes devoted to the
likes of Rainer, Deren, and Joyce Wieland. As more and more scholars
and publishers tackle the challenges of researching women experimental
filmmakers, the odds increase that the films will still be here for the
generations to come.
The one question that is bound to arise in perusing the table of con-
tents of this book is, why these filmmakers and not others? Regret-
tably, there are no chapters on Sara Kathryn Arledge, Freude Bartlett,
Julie Dash, Storm de Hirsch, Tracey Moffatt, Anne Severson, and many
more.∞∑ An anthology can contain only a certain number of essays, of
course, but in these cases there were simply no scholars currently willing
or able to write about these artists. In other cases, such as that of Yoko
Ono and certainly Deren, the reconsideration of their life’s work has
already begun.∞∏ For the most part, however, the filmmakers included in
this anthology are those who have achieved recognition, if not from the
field at large then at least from the small group of scholars involved with
experimental cinema.
6 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
Introduction to the Filmmakers and the Essays
Many of the connections between the filmmakers considered in this
anthology are simply the result of the era in which they started working.
Most of the artists discussed are primarily filmmakers, although several
also work in video. Because of the dominance of the North American
avant-garde between the 1950s and 1970s in the art world and in colleges
and universities, many women were exposed to experimental cinema and
began to make it themselves. Thus, most of the filmmakers are American,
and all either worked in the United States or are involved in contempo-
rary political or aesthetic concerns familiar to U.S. scholars. Joyce Wie-
land, for example, was Canadian, but she worked side by side with her
husband, Michael Snow, one of the key members of the North American
avant-garde. Although there are many international women filmmakers,
past and present, whose work deserves recognition, this anthology’s na-
tional focus seeks to rectify the commonly held notion that the American
avant-garde was exclusively male. The filmmakers to be discussed include
Marie Menken, Joyce Wieland, Gunvor Nelson, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee
Schneemann, Barbara Rubin, Amy Greenfield, Barbara Hammer, Chick
Strand, Marjorie Keller, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh,
Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, and several others who are discussed briefly
in the book’s conclusion.
It is not the aim of this book to write an overarching history or con-
struct a movement that would include or explain each filmmaker who is
studied. In fact, what is most exciting about much of the analysis of the
films in this book is the degree to which the work often cannot be in-
serted in a coherent way into any preexisting history of avant-garde film.
The films, many of which appear to be incoherent and difficult to read in
their intentional or unintentional challenge to classical Hollywood cin-
ema, share only the quality of speaking, albeit in many voices, of a sense
of something missing. In my own essay, ‘‘Amnesis Time: The Films of
Marjorie Keller,’’ I have called this element the ‘‘lost object’’ to express a
notion common in much of the work presented in the book.∞π The title of
one of Leslie Thornton’s films, Adynata, a word meaning the expression
of the impossibility of expression, is yet another and perhaps the most
appropriate term to describe much of the cinematic work examined in
this volume.
One of the more striking aspects of the essays is the degree to which
they revise the current impression of the filmmaker in question. To a large
INTRODUCTION ∏ 7
extent, women filmmakers in general are most often discussed when their
films can be seen as lyrical meditations, vaguely in the tradition of Jonas
Mekas or Stan Brakhage but less constructed.∞∫ There is evidently some-
thing that seems appropriate about a woman making poetic film, or what
David James calls the ‘‘film diary’’ as opposed to the ‘‘diary film.’’ Whereas
the film diary is the unsophisticated record of the filmmaker’s world, the
diary film mediates the raw, unplanned material shot in daily life with
editing, other kinds of material, and sound. ∞Ω Yet the broad stroke with
which the adjective lyrical is applied to women’s film becomes symptom-
atic of either a refusal actually to examine the work or discomfort with the
films themselves. A case in point is found in the work of Marie Menken,
the first filmmaker examined. Menken’s gestural camerawork, heavy edit-
ing, and manipulation of the surface of the film influenced Brakhage and
Mekas, but her work is not necessarily primarily lyrical, as it is almost
always described. As Melissa Ragona discusses in her essay ‘‘Swing and
Sway: Marie Menken’s Filmic Events,’’ Menken was not interested in her
subjective responses to her perception of her domestic world but rather
simply recorded footage of what she saw around her to use as fragmentary
elements in the creation of films that may or may not have been substan-
tively connected to her life. Likewise, a film such as Joyce Wieland’s
Handtinting, featuring girls in motion, may appear to be merely expres-
sive but is formally rigorous with its looping, flipping, and abrupt editing
used to comment on alienation and entrapment. As Paul Arthur suggests
in ‘‘Different/Same/Both/Neither: The Polycentric Cinema of Joyce Wie-
land,’’ Wieland is no poetess of the cinema, nor does she simply quote the
films of those working in the lyrical tradition. Instead, Wieland engages in
a critical dialogue with the avant-garde itself. Other filmmakers whose
work has been mistakenly thought of as closer to the film diary than
the more complex diary film include Keller, Schneemann, and Friedrich.
This work is neither simply introspectively connected with women’s con-
sciousness raising nor is it derivative of the films of male counterparts.
Although many of the filmmakers cite the influence of Brakhage, Mekas,
Gregory Markopoulos, and Bruce Baille in the lyrical vein, and Bruce
Conner, Hollis Frampton, and Snow regarding found footage and struc-
tural cinema, the women’s work sometimes deconstructs or repudiates,
occasionally quotes, but often has nothing to do with its counterpart in
the traditionally defined American avant-garde.
The tendency to categorize and dismiss women’s filmmaking as simple
diary, particularly in its early years, has had the unfortunate consequence
of rending the pervasive irony and humor of much of this work invisible.
8 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
Menken again provides a clear example; her playful, formally complex
animation films of the early 1960s, such as Hurry! Hurry!, with its racing
sperm, are little known, most likely because they contradict the sense of
her as a film poet. Another case in point is the work of Gunvor Nelson. In
her essay ‘‘Excavating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory Frames: Signa-
ture, Translation, Resonance and Gunvor Nelson’s Films,’’ Chris Holm-
lund does not let the reader forget Nelson’s Schmeergunz, an aggres-
sively funny film made in 1966 that contrasts mass media images of
female beauty with drain cleaning and vomiting in reverse. Similar exam-
ples could be provided for most of the filmmakers, whose perceptive
intelligence when facing the world, and particularly women’s place in
it, necessarily manifests a sense of humor. As filmmakers such as Frie-
drich, Ahwesh, and Dunye have gained greater visibility, it has become
ever more apparent that wit and irony are not foreign elements in wom-
en’s experimental cinema but perhaps the most omnipresent characteris-
tic of all.
While current women artists working in cinema unabashedly refer to
themselves as filmmakers, previous generations often not only called and
continue to call themselves artists, tout court, but also persist in working
in their original media. Wieland is the only person to have worked in
textiles, but she is joined as a painter, printmaker, and installation artist
by Menken, Nelson, Thornton, Schneemann, and others to a lesser de-
gree. The title of M. M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey’s essay, ‘‘Eye/Body:
The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann,’’ stresses the degree to
which the cinema is not always the privileged mode of creation but rather
a tool in a larger, often kinesthetic project. However, as Paul Arthur
significantly indicates in his work on Wieland, the very heterogeneity
that makes these artists so interesting has been partially to blame for
their lack of visibility in an art world that tends to categorize artists by
medium. Those artists who came from dance, on the contrary, seem to
have been better able to integrate their practices and gain recognition as
filmmakers, perhaps because the dance film has a history broad enough
to include them. Noël Carroll’s ‘‘Moving and Moving: From Minimalism
to Lives of Performers’’ and Robert A. Haller’s ‘‘Amy Greenfield: Film,
Dynamic Movement, and Transformation’’ trace Yvonne Rainer’s and
Greenfield’s use of the cinema as a choreographic partner, albeit in very
different ways.
Diversity in the backgrounds brought to the cinema, ranging from the
arts noted above to the institution building carried out by both Chick
Strand, who was also an ethnographer, and Marjorie Keller, who was a
INTRODUCTION ∏ 9
film scholar, is matched by the variety of political positions taken by the
filmmakers. While some of the earliest women covered may have been
less likely to have been part of the feminist movement, simply because
of when they were born, there are others, such as Nelson, Rainer, and
Thornton, who distinctly stated at a certain point that their art was not
feminist. Of the others, there is a broad range of political activity, ranging
from direct involvement in the women’s movement and larger social
justice issues to theoretical work in the burgeoning field of film studies.
The most visible of women filmmakers over the past several decades have
been lesbian, most likely because their work has been investigated and
publicized in anthologies and conferences specifically concerned with
issues of identity and representation and the broader field of queer stud-
ies.≤≠ Chuck Kleinhans’s ‘‘Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History’’ examines
the filmmaker whose wide-ranging work and vigorous self-promotion
have made her one of the best known of not only lesbian filmmakers but
all women filmmakers. Although almost half of the women studied in this
volume identify themselves as lesbian, the writers have not restricted
their studies to this aspect of the work alone but have looked at the films
in their widest possible context.
Whether or not various filmmakers identify themselves or their work
as feminist, almost all share the feminist-inspired tendency to employ
nonhierarchical, collaborative production practices. To a striking degree,
these artists coauthored films, worked with a company of actors and
technicians who sometimes even alternated roles, and engaged in a di-
alogue about their art in the larger context of women’s cinema. Film
history sometimes has interpreted these practices as indicating a lack of
competence or confidence rather than as pioneering new modes of social
relations. Associated with this approach to production were the sustain-
ing efforts by Strand and Keller, particularly, on behalf of the distribution,
exhibition, and critical reception of the avant-garde through work with,
most notably, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Film-Makers’ Coop-
erative in New York, respectively.
The films themselves are enormously experimental and diverse in
form and method. One of the more audacious formats in all of avant-
garde cinema is that used by Barbara Rubin in Christmas on Earth of
1963. As Ara Osterweil notes in ‘‘ ‘Absently Enchanted’: The Apocryphal,
Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin,’’ the seventeen-year-old Rubin used
two 16mm projectors at once but projected the films onto a single screen
so that the images of sexual activity were appropriately layered, one per-
meating the other. The creative use of technology is further reflected in
10 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
the wide variety of formats employed. While the early filmmakers were
limited to Super 8 and sometimes 16mm film, Ahwesh currently chooses
to use Super 8 and many more periodically return to 16mm in this digital
age. On the other hand, as Kathleen McHugh notes in ‘‘The Experimen-
tal ‘Dunyementary’: A Cinematic Signature Effect’’ and Janet Cutler ob-
serves in ‘‘Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules,’’ both Dunye and Friedrich
use or aspire to work in 35mm film to reach the broadest possible au-
dience. Most of the artists make single films, although several are work-
ing in more complex forms such as installation. Mary Ann Doane writes
of open-ended film projects in her essay, ‘‘In the Ruins of the Image: The
Work of Leslie Thornton,’’ and Maureen Turim considers serial films in
‘‘Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the Films of Abigail Child.’’
The work of all of these filmmakers tends toward documentary rather
than fiction, necessarily expanding the definition of documentary through
the choice of subjects and formal experimentation. While the films of
Rainer, Friedrich, and Dunye are also concerned with narrative, almost all
of the filmmakers find their raw material in their own worlds and lives. As
suggested, the use of domestic space and autobiography has been some-
what to blame for the misapprehension of much of the work considered in
this book due to its association with the unconstructed home movie or
film diary. But as Paul Arthur reminds us, the kitchen table that appears
repeatedly in Wieland’s work is just as emblematic and rich as the iconic
cabin in Colorado that appears so often in Brakhage’s films or Andy
Warhol’s Factory (and the same could be said for Nelson’s family homes or
Schneemann’s cats). Like Menken and Keller in particular, Wieland films
her familiar life at home because it is there and because it provides
exemplary material with which to create political film. The assumption
that these films romantically document ‘‘feminine’’ matters involving the
home, love relationships, children, or birth could hardly be further from
the truth.
The most perilous but popular focus in these films is the female body
itself, and its use has been the prime cause of the split between women
filmmakers and feminist theorists that this book implicitly addresses.
Many of the filmmakers have blurred the line between performer and
observer in their work as a means of investigating the thorny issues
surrounding the representation of the female body. The modes of ap-
proach are myriad, ranging from almost total elimination of the body to
complete exposure—and sometimes combining the two. In all of the
films, from Wieland’s fragmentation and magnification of body parts to
Keller’s refusal to show more than a small section of the body, and then
INTRODUCTION ∏ 11
never the part that the camerawork would lead one to expect, the film-
maker’s presence is strong. The interrogation of the body’s status as a
cultural and linguistic sign, rather than a natural object, is pervasive and
constant. Alternately, from Nelson’s capturing of the body performing
the most mundane acts, such as inserting a tampon or vomiting, to
Rainer’s flat, quotidian movements of bodies dressed in street clothes
in Lives of Performers of 1972, the filmmakers challenge the traditional
means and rationales for objectifying the female body.
The most contentious and risky variation is the full exposure of the
naked female form, which has alternately been perceived as a celebration
of the autonomous and liberated body or a frankly embarrassing example
of naive essentialism. While Child and Ahwesh integrate exposure with
fragmentation through formal means, stressing repetitive gesture and
everyday movement in the former and the dissolution of the image-
bearing emulsion itself in the latter, others go for full disclosure. Schnee-
mann and Rubin are the most notorious in this regard, and their 1963
films Fuses and Christmas on Earth were unavailable for viewing for
many years as a result. Rubin’s film explores every possible combination
of male and female bodies in a style that reveals all but also fragments,
masks, and distances in a continual metamorphosis in which the camera
is an active partner. Due to its relatively straightforward celebration of
heterosexual sex between two beautiful and identifiable people, Fuses has
been the lightning rod. Schneemann intended literally to envision her
bodily perception of her world in all its layers of complexity and to reject
the nudity of patriarchal discourse that objectifies the body in favor of the
nakedness of the subject. Theorists, however, derided the film for its
naïveté in believing that its intention to show the unclothed female body
in a nonsexist way could be read by the film’s viewers. Greenfield’s films,
in which the naked body is featured as well, have been equally problem-
atic for theorists, despite the filmmaker’s claim that the absence of cloth-
ing rejects the fetishization of conventional eroticism and allows the
powerful body in action to dominate. Perhaps because of their outsider
status and the unfamiliarity of the images, lesbian filmmakers have been
freer to depict the naked body, and several artists, including Hammer and
Friedrich, have dealt with both the aging and diseased body in addition.
In order to create images that challenge conventional representation
of the female body and the limitations of classical Hollywood structures
in general, all of the filmmakers experiment with the medium. One of
the greatest misconceptions about this experimentation is that its often
startling and vexing variations from the linear and orderly norm signify
12 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
incompetence. On the contrary, the technique that signifies amateur-
ism and disorder is quite intentional and often formally complex; the
loosely shot footage is invariably heavily edited. Menken’s loose, gestural
camerawork—copied by the majority of the filmmakers who followed
her—is emblematic in its extremity. Not only did Menken hold the cam-
era as she walked but she allowed her cigarette smoke to drift into the
shot and took little care to clean her lens. The shakiness, the movement
in and out of focus, the inclusion of the flash frames at the end of the film
roll, and general home-movie look of the shots call attention to the
filmmaker and prevent the illusion of transparency and clarity so valued
by both Hollywood and the structural filmmakers of the late 1960s. As
Maria Pramaggiore discusses in ‘‘Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnogra-
phy,’’ at least one filmmaker went so far as to dance with her camera in
hand to stress the subjectivity of her gaze and her relationship with her
subject. While the gestural camera dominates, Rainer, Thornton, Frie-
drich, and Dunye privilege static, frontal camera placement. Regardless
of the various techniques used for achieving distance through camera
positioning, the filmmakers are united in their intensive use of associative
or disjunctive rather than linear editing.
The temporal span of this book reveals many interesting formal and
thematic developments and transformations over the decades, but few as
intriguing as the progression from the dirty aesthetic of Menken’s work
to the pop culture–centered one of Ahwesh and Dunye. As William C.
Wees explores in ‘‘Peggy’s Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist Para-
digm,’’ Ahwesh takes as her field not only the medium itself, but also its
entire history of representation. Her ironic, impertinent, free-flowing,
and seemingly carelessly made films challenge authority on every level,
from the notion of the well-made film to the importance of the stable
subject. Dunye joins Ahwesh in this confrontation, finding her cinematic
self, as McHugh puts it, in situation comedies of 1970s television. This
confluence in which Dunye’s postmodern, media-created surfaces return
us to what Ragona calls Menken’s comprehension of the world as ‘‘extra-
terrestrial ephemera’’ is one of the book’s more interesting revelations.
While Rainer’s work would appear to be far from that of Menken, Ah-
wesh, or Dunye, her simultaneous investigation of her domestic world,
her filmic narrating of the stories taken from this realm, and her self-
reflexive meditation on the ways in which Hollywood has influenced her
telling participate in a similar investigation of interiors versus exteriors.
The evocation of surfaces, whether natural or media-created, suggests
perhaps the single most prevalent formal device among all the film-
INTRODUCTION ∏ 13
makers: a layering of images. Both a literal means of construction and a
powerful metaphor, the technique has its origins in weaving and working
with fabric, the kinds of gendered labor in which Wieland originally
worked as a textile artist and in which women have traditionally found
themselves as editors. Holmlund responds to this quality in Nelson’s
work by shaping her essay around the metaphor of archeology. She sees
the films as centered on the revelation of what is beneath both the mate-
rial and the metaphysical worlds as revealed first through decay and time
and then through the work of the camera. Strand’s and Keller’s films are
equally focused and formed through superimposition on both the visual
and aural tracks, while Schneemann’s original copy of Fuses was made up
of so many layers of celluloid and paint that it was almost impossible to
print. This search for what lies beneath surface appearance and conven-
tion is also carried out, in Friedrich in particular, through the literal
scratching away of the film’s emulsion.
Concurrent with the visual layering is the interweaving of the sound
track. In the vast majority of films, disjunction reigns between image and
sound and within the audio track. As both Child and Keller make quite
clear in their writing, the complex sound tracks are not casual collages of
sound but are scored in relation to specific images. Others, such as Nel-
son and Strand, work more loosely in the creation of tapestries of sound
made up of conversation, music, ambient noise, and silence. On the other
end of the spectrum, Rainer and Thornton work with speech and printed
text, sometimes in combination with more diffuse sound, in order to
investigate language itself. While Rainer foregrounds narrative and the
effect of the voice through recitation rather than performance, Thorn-
ton’s particularly rich sound tracks manifest and explore what Doane
calls the ‘‘archive of endlessly mutable, significant sound.’’
The notion of the archive is present not only in the audio track but also
in the visual one in the form of found footage. The previously shot film or
video images, advertising imagery, or, in the case of Ahwesh’s She-Puppet
(2001), a video game are juxtaposed with original footage and sound to
refer to and comment upon the larger cultural context, particularly the
mass media. Strand’s practice of using found footage to forge a dialogue
in her overtly ethnographic project is duplicated less deliberately in the
work of other filmmakers. Child, one of the most well-known of all found
footage filmmakers, joins Thornton and Rainer, to a lesser extent, in
using imagery from silent cinema to explore the history of the cinematic
representation of women. However, Child also uses found imagery in
14 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
abstract ways, creating rhythmic mosaics in which people become ma-
chinelike, in a tradition that hearkens back to the earliest cinema of
attractions.≤∞ As one might expect, the excess of fragmentation, layering,
and interweaving of sounds and images from the filmmaker’s experience
and film history give rise to a degree of surrealism. Keller notes in her
scholarly work on Jean Cocteau and Joseph Cornell that the cinema itself,
with its reality effect, allows the improbable to enter the real world to a
degree unparalleled in any other art form. With notable frequency, many
of the films evoke and comment upon the sometimes humorous and
often surreal disassociations between patriarchal culture and women’s
lives within it.
If there is any thematic link connecting the work of these fifteen film-
makers, it would be that of looking beneath and uncovering. What is
revealed below the literal and metaphorical layers in the films takes many
forms but in almost every case involves emotion. Some filmmakers quite
deliberately have sought to unveil the passions. Strand turned to film-
making from ethnography out of frustration with her male colleagues,
whose self-imposed distance from their subjects created what she felt to
be inaccurate impressions and even false data. Film, when used creatively
rather than as a recording device, had the potential to reveal something
authentic about the encounter with the subject. In a different manner but
a similar spirit, Rainer left dance for film in order not to simply express
emotion corporeally, which she had rejected as ideologically misguided
in dance, but to both represent and analyze emotion. Where her work in
dance revealed the ‘‘essential conditions of dance,’’ as Carroll suggests,
her work in film allowed her to investigate what might be called the
essential conditions of life.
At least two filmmakers worked even more specifically to uncover the
complex feeling and sentiment behind the veneers of both life and the
well-made film. Schneemann and Keller made films in reaction to Brak-
hage’s films about sex and birth. They worked in different ways to get be-
neath the beautiful and striking surfaces for which Brakhage was known
to reveal the sense of relentless becoming and overwhelming intensity
that more closely approximate for women the experience of the physi-
cality of love and family life. This search for a means to represent emotion
was pervasive in the work of filmmakers who started working before the
1980s. At times the exploration involved a specific context or event, but
often the field was more amorphous, as in Nelson’s moody, resonant
films, which arouse the desire to explore beneath the surface without
INTRODUCTION ∏ 15
necessarily revealing what is found. On the other hand, the work of more
contemporary filmmakers such as Friedrich, Ahwesh, and Dunye seems
less constricted by what is to them a distant avant-garde film history that
valued the repression of emotion both in structural film and even in
ostensibly more expressive modes.
What then finally can be made of the layers, the fragments, and the
archeological metaphors that resonate in and through these films? What
do the filmmakers find? For some, particularly Rainer, Hammer, and
Friedrich, something substantial is recovered through accumulation and
juxtaposition, resulting in analysis and critique. The past and the means
through which it has been constructed are revealed to be questioned,
understood, and either accepted contingently or rejected. For others the
process is less clear-cut. In the work of Nelson, Schneemann, Strand, and
Greenfield, the archeological process suggests images of what lies beyond
words and even beyond consciousness in ways that are impossible to
articulate but are surely of interest for their ability to disturb. In this same
vein but with a more precise vision, Keller suggests that nothing remains
of experience that has not entered into language. Her films are full of
empty spaces, both materially in the form of blank leader and in the world
she records, but they also show where this irrecoverable past, now a
lacuna, interrupts the logic of cohesive narratives and history itself. Kel-
ler’s paradoxical reliance on the evidentiary status of photography and
cinema recurs in the work of Thornton and Child. All three are interested
in what has not been spoken and remains unspeakable, but which lies
embedded in the patriarchal discourses that overtly block further inves-
tigation. Like many of the filmmakers, they look in the least promising
places and often locate through cinema, not truth, but something that
rings true. Finally, for the most contemporary of the filmmakers, par-
ticularly Ahwesh and Dunye, there is no pressure to attempt to reveal
anything (although, of course, they do). McHugh notes Dunye’s rejection
of the very notion of her own invisibility, which the filmmaker sees as a
negative quality used in power relations. The younger filmmakers accept
the surface of the culture in which they live, parodying and inventing with
self-reflexive glee, secure in the knowledge that the era in which those
few men in charge of the isolated avant-garde film journals and festivals
had the power to determine visibility or lack thereof is past.
In introducing this volume of essays, I have mentioned all of the
authors and the titles of their work at least once to the degree that they
particularly exemplify a specific trait common to all or some of the group,
16 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
and certainly not in accordance with their greater or lesser importance.
Each of the sixteen essays that follow, fifteen of which were written for
this anthology≤≤ and the last of which introduces several filmmakers not
discussed in individual chapters, adheres to a similar trajectory. Each
scholar concentrates on his or her own area of expertise, and the ap-
proaches and styles of the essays vary in enlightening ways. But every
writer provides specific social, political, or artistic contexts for under-
standing the filmmaker and her work, along with exemplary critical read-
ings of a representative sample of the films, in an overall length deemed
appropriate to the particular methodology used. The essays are organized
somewhat chronologically to suggest their historical development in re-
lation to experimental film in general and their connections to other
artistic and scholarly spheres, social movements, and political activity.
By way of conclusion, and encouragement, the anthology ends with an
essay by Scott MacDonald on the pedagogical challenges of teaching
women’s experimental cinema. MacDonald’s description of the practical
problems he has faced is sobering but helpful. His own selection of exem-
plary films for classroom use extends the breadth of this book, reinforc-
ing the conviction held by all of the writers that the group of filmmakers
discussed here could easily be tripled. This anthology, we hope, is simply
one phase of a larger project that will be continued and extended by
readers and students who are inspired to conduct further archival re-
search, engage in comparative scholarship, and teach the films that make
up the loosely defined canon of women’s experimental cinema. In con-
crete terms, the material uncovered here ought to appear in databases
that can facilitate an ongoing project. Likewise, this book, with its not-so-
ulterior mission of preserving the films of experimental women film-
makers, would fulfill its highest function if it inspired film festivals re-
quiring high-quality prints of the work. Finally, although the field of film
studies must fight for the future of 8mm and 16mm projection, it must
also seek funding to create digital versions of the material, which are
essential for classroom use and, in some cases, for the purpose of preser-
vation. As the Women Film Pioneers project, which deals with women in
silent film history, has discovered, every year that passes makes the re-
covery of lost films and tenuously preserved information more difficult,
more frustrating, and less successful. ≤≥ I speak for all of the writers in
this anthology in expressing my belief that the history of cinema will
be greatly impoverished if it loses the legacy of these filmmakers and
their work.
INTRODUCTION ∏ 17
Notes
1 Organized by Jacques Ledoux, the first Belgian festival, the Festival Inter-
national du Film Expérimental and Poétique, was held in the summer of 1949,
the second, the Experimental Film Competition, was held in Brussels in the
spring of 1958, and the rest of the events were titled International Experimental
Film Competition and held in Knokke, with the third held from December 25,
1963, to January 2, 1964, the fourth during the same dates in 1967–68, and the
fifth and final one during the same period in 1974–75.
2 The records of the festival at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique indi-
cate that women’s work was a minimal presence in the festival, with 5 percent
or less representation from North America overall, and even these women
were most often present as part of a male/female couple.
3 Keller, ‘‘Report from Knokke-Exprmentl 5,’’28–33. Keller notes particu-
larly the number of purportedly feminist films in the festival that were es-
sentially sexist male fantasies, and she makes an equally strong case against
women’s films that she sees as banal psychodramas. She also remarks on the
festival’s unfortunate exclusion of 8mm and Super 8 films, both of which were
less expensive to shoot and more easily available to women filmmakers.
4 Michelson and Sitney, ‘‘A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent
Filmmaker.’’
5 Patricia Mellencamp notes in Indiscretions: Avant-Garde, Video, and
Feminism, that many approaches to the avant-garde, particularly Sitney’s Vi-
sionary Film, serve primarily as investigations of the romantic artist—who is
by definition male—in which women can only be muses, critics, lovers, or
mothers (19). I note, however, that Sitney’s latest work in progress encompasses
the films of Marie Menken, Abigail Child, and Su Friedrich, among others.
6 Women and Film 1, nos. 1–6, and 2, no. 7 (1972–75); Film Library Quar-
terly 5, no. 1 (1971–72); and Take One 3, no. 2 (1972).
7 For a list of all the films shown, see D. Kaplan, ‘‘Part 3: Selected Short
Subjects/First International Women’s Film Festival,’’ 37–39.
8 Martineau, ‘‘Women’s Film Daily,’’ 36.
9 Braderman, ‘‘First Festival of Women’s Films,’’ 87.
10 Rich, Chick Flicks , 29–39.
11 See Johnston, ‘‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’’ and Mulvey, ‘‘Vi-
sual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’
12 Martineau, ‘‘Women’s Film Daily,’’ 37.
13 As early as 1973, the editors of Women and Film 1, nos. 3–4 (1973): 5,
made the following plea: ‘‘For this issue of Women and Film, we received
countless articles on the commercial product and disproportionately few writ-
ings on independent films made by women even though these films represent
in quantity, form and content, the most significant contribution of these last 12
months of cinema history. . . . [Feminists] spend 90% of their energy giving
18 ∏ ROBIN BLAETZ
attention to men’s works thereby ironically validating them and confirming
their right to monopolize all spheres.’’ The editors then call for improved
distribution and exhibition of women’s films, the establishment of archives,
particularly for fragile 8mm film, and, crucially, for the theorizing of feminist
cinema. Little did they know that the growth of theory would further erode
scholarly work on women’s cinema, except for those films that overtly worked
in opposition to classical Hollywood film. By 1974, in the next to last issue of
Women and Film, Julia Lesage wrote in a footnote to her essay, ‘‘Feminist Film
Criticism: Theory and Practice,’’ that little had been written about experimental
film because ‘‘these films are not as accessible for rental as narrative films,
nor have we considered what role these films play in a feminist cinema.’’ She
then makes a plea for ‘‘the greater support of experimental filmmaking by
women’’ (18).
14 Bazin, What Is Cinema? , 107.
15 While Patricia Mellencamp’s fascinating work in progress on Moffatt was
not suitable for this project, it will undoubtedly appear in another format soon.
16 See Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, and Nichols, Maya Deren
and the American Avant-Garde , in particular.
17 I note that I am not referring to the lost object of psychoanalytic theory. I
do not read the films and their diverse representation of formal and thematic
gaps and holes with the prescriptive theoretical assumption that the absence of
the mother is the motivating force of desire and thus language. Instead I see in
this work something more amorphous that is, if not outside of the discourse of
patriarchy, clearly a threat to its dominion.
18 Both Mekas and Brakhage worked almost exclusively in their domestic
spaces, filming family, friends, homes, and the natural world around them. See
Sitney, Visionary Film, for further information about both directors.
19 James, ‘‘Film Diary/Diary Film,’’ 147. I note that James’s own articulation
of the movement between the two approaches is complex and not particularly
based on gender.
20 See the Women Make Movies web site for an extensive list of film fes-
tivals devoted to lesbian or gay and lesbian film (www.wmm.com/resources).
21 See Gunning, ‘‘The Cinema of Attractions.’’
22 Carroll’s essay about Rainer’s well-known Lives of Performers both is
shorter than most of the other essays and has been published previously in
Millennium Film Journal. It is included because it has received little exposure
and it offers a suggestive contextualization of Rainer’s work in regard to mini-
malism and to structural film, the dominant avant-garde practice in the late
1960s and early 1970s.
23 The Women Film Pioneers project, located at Duke University under the
direction of Jane Gaines, seeks to make public information about the women
who worked in all capacities in the earliest years of the film industry. See
www.duke.edu/web/film/pioneers.
INTRODUCTION ∏ 19
MELISSA RAGONA
Swing and Sway
Marie Menken’s Filmic Events
b
Marie Menken (1910–70) is one of the least recognized experimental
filmmakers of her generation. Menken’s influence on filmmakers like
Willard Maas (her husband and collaborator), Stan Brakhage, Jonas
Mekas, Norman McLaren, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, and Andy War-
hol is vast and varied. Brakhage has written the most lucidly and candidly
about Menken’s life. Indeed, he claims that Menken was one of the most
important influences on his ‘‘lid-swinging’’ or ‘‘ways of seeing’’ through
the camera eye. ∞ In step with Parker Tyler, who claims that Menken was
‘‘one of the very first to endow the handheld camera with an elementary
sort of dance pulse’’ or a signature ‘‘swing and sway,’’ ≤ Brakhage argues
that the fluidity of Menken’s camera was revolutionary for filmmakers
during the 1950s and 1960s who still felt they had to ‘‘imitate the Holly-
wood dolly shot, without dollies.’’ ≥ The smooth pan that implied the
invisibility of the camera, a seamlessness without human error, was a
norm that Menken challenged with her ‘‘free, swinging, swooping hand-
held pans.’’
Menken’s use of film as a new perceptual medium—especially one that
could be manipulated as an object—suggested several paths down which
one could travel aesthetically. As Brakhage implied, her work inspired
him to think about the relationship of paint to film and eventually paint-
ing on film, a process he began to explore in the early 1960s. He describes
Menken’s approach to the film strip, in a similar way to his own during
this period: ‘‘When she came to film, then she looked at it first of all as a
‘thread’ of many shades and colors to be woven or ‘spun out’ into related
patterns. She would hold the strips of film in her hand very much as
she would strands of beads to be put into a collage painting. She would
hang the film strips on clothespins and, after much meditation and often
without running them through a viewer at all, would cut them together.’’∂
As Sitney describes, ‘‘a quarter of Brakhage’s oeuvre was made without
using a camera,’’ but unlike Menken, Brakhage moved toward an abstract
expressionist penchant for medium-specific painterliness, individuality,
and the uniqueness of the painterly mark in film. In contrast, Menken’s
later work led her more and more toward viewing film as an event-based
medium. Closer to Fluxus performance aesthetics and Pop Art’s quick
play with the readymade, Menken’s animations played skillfully with both
the objecthood of film (making the viewer aware of film frame, projec-
tion surface, shot arrangement, and montage sequence) as well as film’s
performativity—its ability to animate the inanimate, to reveal critical
relationships between media: film frame and painterly canvas, audio and
image, language and figure.∑
Born in 1910 in New York to Lithuanian immigrant parents, Menken
began painting in her early twenties. In the mid-1930s, she received a
residence-grant from Yaddo, an art colony in upstate New York, where
she met the poet and filmmaker Willard Maas, whom she married in
1937.∏ Cecil Starr writes that she ‘‘worked as [Hilla] Rebay’s secretary’’
for the Gallery of Non-Objective Painting (later known as the Guggen-
heim Museum) in order to support her work as a painter during this
period.π In her position as Rebay’s assistant, Menken attended many film
screenings or ‘‘Concerts of Non-Objectivity,’’ organized by Rebay which
included films by Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, and
Norman McLaren. From the mid-1940s until the time of her death in
1970, Menken worked as a night-time manager of the Foreign News
Department at Time-Life in New York.∫ Outside a few, very brief reviews
of her shows at the Tibor de Nagy and Betty Parsons galleries in New
York, not much is known about Menken’s early painting, but by the 1950s
she had begun experimenting with other media, including sand, collage,
assemblage, and installation.Ω Film seemed to provide the logical step that
would bring her work into more kinetic arrangements and allow her to
explore the Duchampian chance operations that she was already engaged
in with painting.
In the inaugural show of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1950, Menken
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 21
Marie Menken at work. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
was surrounded by a new second school of New York painters: Franz
Kline, Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Harry Jackson,
Alfred Leslie, Robert Goodnough, and Helen Frankenthaler. ∞≠ While this
second school defied the orthodox abstract expressionism of the color
field painters like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and
Adolph Gottlieb, they still remained devoted to the material of paint—a
medium that Menken found limited, and which she began to explore and
extend through film. Her engagement in the worlds of Fluxus (through
her friendship with Robert Watts) and Pop Art (amplified by her involve-
ment in Warhol’s film projects) further inspired her rejection of abstract
expressionist concerns with the specificity of paint and canvas.∞∞
Menken used film as a way of rethinking painting and sculptural prob-
lems, in particular the transition from abstract expressionism to Pop and
conceptual projects. The latter can be most clearly read in her ironic title,
Pop Goes the Easel (1964),∞≤ or in her explicit works on painting like
Mood Mondrian (1963) or Drips in Strips (1963). Most commonly, Men-
ken’s talents have been read through her poet husband Maas’s work,
focusing on her contribution to the film poem or film sentence. This is
underlined by Jonas Mekas’s description of her work in his 1962 Film
Journal: ‘‘The structure of Menken’s filmic sentences, her movements,
and her rhythms are those of poetry.’’∞≥ In the scant critical literature on
Menken produced primarily by Brakhage, Sitney, and Mekas (more re-
cently by David James and Scott MacDonald), Menken is lauded as one of
the great film diarists, as a film poet, and as one of the important in-
ventors of the lyrical tradition in film.∞∂ In this essay, I hope to reveal
how these critics and filmmakers, in their efforts to celebrate her within
the purview of their own achievements (Brakhage and Mekas are cen-
tral players here), reduce the specificity and complexity of her work.
While Menken was interested in the materiality of cinematic language,
her strategies are more deeply concerned with ungrounding the easel-
based practices of drawing and sculpture through film. Film not only
freed her from canvas and brush but allowed her to critique the verticality
and stasis of 1940s painting and object-based practices. Her handheld
camera produced a frenetic vertigo on sculptural, architectural, natu-
ral, and domestic objects, while her play with animation stretched the
borders of film frame and event. Cinematic writing with light (as seen
in Moonplay, Lights, Greek Epiphany, and Night Writing, all combined
in Notebook) replaced painterly values; perception, not paint, became
medium.
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 23
The Notebook: Quick Sketches and Events
Menken’s work addresses a moment in painting and art making similar to
the modernist turn taken by Gertrude Stein in the early twentieth cen-
tury. Stein, privy to the worlds of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and
Camille Pissarro, was interested in the shape and duration of the frag-
ment; consequently her writing was more of a response to painting than
literature. As Brakhage has noted, the influence Menken had on his work
was in step with the inspiration Stein had asserted upon him, ‘‘continually
draw[ing] [him] toward the material of [his] daily living rather than ‘liter-
ature.’ ’’∞∑ The notion of a ‘‘notebook,’’ journal, or diary has played a cen-
tral role in framing Menken’s filmic work critically. ∞∏ As indicated above,
she is often referred to as a film poet, one of the first to use the film
journal as a form. One of my contentions, however, is that the history of
the film diary, which is placed squarely at the center of Menken’s inven-
tion, uses only a very specific definition to propagate this genealogy.
David James gives an exhaustive treatise on the differences between
the film diary and the diary film. In brief, he argues that the film diary de-
livers immediacy, raw daily life; it privileges a single textual sense, that of
the subjective position of the filmmaker. In contrast, the diary film is
mediated: ‘‘it subjects the original images to sounds and disjunct visual
material.’’∞π The impossibility of a pure version of the former (unmedi-
ated, the problem of the ever-slipping present, the presence of the un-
staged filmmaker) has been a main critique of this genre.∞∫ But James
gives Mekas credit for approaching the contradictions of the film diary
with panache: ‘‘Mekas was the first fully to articulate this combination
of imperatives—the need to respond immediately with the camera to and
in the present, and the need to subjectivize that recording—as the essen-
tial conditions of the film diary, and the first fully to turn them to advan-
tage, and eventually to invest filmic attention to daily life with religious
significance.’’∞Ω
Menken, on the other hand, is inscribed by James as an extension
of feminist diary writing of the 1970s, ‘‘where introspection and self-
awareness were understood as individual participation in a collective
historical recovery.’’≤≠ After Menken, he cites work by Chantal Akerman,
Storm de Hirsch, Su Friedrich, Marjorie Keller, Yvonne Rainer, Amalie
Rothschild, Carolee Schneemann, and Claudia Weill as a continuation of
this tradition. In contrast, male experimental filmmakers, such as An-
drew Noren, George Pinkus, and Mekas, began utilizing the film diary
approach only after 1960s avant-garde filmmaking models lost steam (he
24 ∏ MELISSA RAGONA
seems to be referring to structuralist film). In short, Menken’s invention
of the film diary is valued as something unique because it strongly influ-
enced Mekas and Brakhage. Moreover, it is read as an existential, anti-
structural move, a more enlightened form than the subjective works
offered by ‘‘people of color, women, and gays.’’ ≤∞ In contrast, Mekas’s and
Brakhage’s form of the film diary are presented as having more structural
rigor, as well as being informed by the open, more personal, feminist-
inspired essay.
Menken’s Notebook, I would like to argue, is closer to quick sketching
than journal writing—and it does not reflect the kind of subjective auto-
biography and existential angst that works like Walden (Mekas, 1964–
69) or Anticipation of the Night (Brakhage, 1958) represent. Menken’s
collection here—‘‘Raindrops,’’ ‘‘Greek Epiphany,’’ ‘‘Moonplay,’’ ‘‘Copy Cat,’’
‘‘Paper Cuts,’’ ‘‘Lights,’’ ‘‘Night Writing,’’ ‘‘The Egg,’’ and ‘‘Etcetcetc.’’—is a
playful sketchbook of manipulated nature, animated objects, and moving
cutouts. From the beginning of this series, Menken was not engaged in
exercising the internal world of the film diary, its registering of the un-
adulterated, subjective view of the filmmaker. Instead, she created a kind
of frenetic artifice out of natural events. For example, in ‘‘Raindrops,’’ she
pushes nature’s clock prematurely: ‘‘As she waits behind the camera for a
drop of rain on the tip of a leaf to gather sufficient mass to fall, we sense
her impatience and even anxiety lest the film will run out on her; so an
unseen hand taps the branch, forcing the drops to fall.’’≤≤ ‘‘Raindrops’’
characterizes, in a sense, the kind of manipulation that Menken regularly
engaged in with her work; she was not interested, as Mekas was, in
registering her ‘‘state of feeling (and all the memories)’’ as she filmed
a particular object, action, or scene. As Sitney has so cogently argued
in Visionary Film, Menken ‘‘tampered’’ with her handheld work. She was
not interested in the ‘‘straightforward observational film’’ but rather
wanted to incorporate her own sordid hand, even if it registered her
cigarette smoke as it wafted into a particular shooting session.≤≥
In Notebook ’s ‘‘Greek Epiphany,’’ ‘‘Moonplay,’’ ‘‘Lights,’’ and ‘‘Night
Writing,’’ Menken treats natural and artificial light with equal valence.
Menken’s experimentation with light as a medium was informed both by
her own fascination of transposing other media (painting, light, sculp-
ture) into filmic contours, and also by the proliferation of art works that
took ‘‘light’’ as both subject and modus operandi. Artists like Julio Le Parc,
Dan Flavin, Chryssa, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Terrell (just to
name a few) were interested in light, perception, movement, and illusion
as a central part of their art practices during the mid-1960s, continuing
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 25
From Marie Menken’s Lights, 1966.
Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
into the 1970s and, in some cases, up into the present. Menken’s fascina-
tion with neon lighting, as presented in ‘‘Night Writing,’’ as well as in
her 3-D works at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in December 1950, is echoed
in the work of Dan Flavin, in which light has the ability to transform an
environment. But where Flavin and Bell were interested in having their
audiences confront light as a sculptural object (as in Flavin’s exposed
fluorescent fixtures or Bell’s light boxes), Menken was closer to Irwin
in her efforts to reveal the hypnotic effect of light divorced from any
object. In ‘‘Night Writing,’’ we are confronted by ‘‘such quick movement’’
that the red and green neon lights seem to be ‘‘brilliant calligraphy on the
screen.’’≤∂ In ‘‘Greek Epiphany,’’ candlelight—at first discernible, analog
light—becomes abstracted into color, marking an anonymous pattern,
rather than an orthodox religious, representational ceremony. A similar
transformation takes place in ‘‘Lights’’ when a Christmas tree is inverted
and its lights take over the screen in 3-D forms. Moreover, an analogy is
made between the tree lights and the lights in an adjacent building,
removing any narrative context from the sense of the decorative. Like-
wise, in ‘‘ Moonplay,’’ the moon as it moves with lightning speed across the
sky seems to appear more like a flashlight or strobe, flattening any sense
of depth of field on the screen. There are two versions of ‘‘Moonplay’’; one
was made for Notebook, and the other, made a bit later, develops the
themes Menken had begun in her first short sketch. The latter is set
to music by Teiji Ito so that the moon moves—through stop-motion
animation—frenetically, wildly with the quick-changing score. As Sitney
has noted, the night photography of Menken’s ‘‘ Moonplay,’’ its fast pan-
ning, fusing of foreground and background, as well as its elimination of
depth are borrowed by Brakhage for Anticipation of the Night. ‘‘A short
mixture of what Marie Menken called both ‘Moonplay’ and ‘Night Writ-
ing,’ here [in Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night] intercut, prepares the
transition to an amusement park, where older children take rides in the
night . . . the lights of the park behind them have next to no depth on
the screen.’’≤∑
The flatness of the screen is even more prominent in Menken’s ani-
mation pieces in Notebook : ‘‘Copycat,’’ ‘‘Paper Cuts,’’ ‘‘The Egg,’’ and ‘‘Et-
cetcetc.’’ Inspiring to Norman McLaren and a host of younger, contem-
porary animators, including Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Emily Breer, and
Martha Colburn, Menken’s animation work nonetheless has been ig-
nored or mentioned briefly in critical discussions of her work.≤∏ This is
most likely because this work, which is playful, irreverent, and abject,
does not fit the prevailing model of her as a lyrical film poet and keen
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 27
observer of everyday life. ‘‘Copycat,’’ a brief study in diagonals, is in some
ways more successful than the longer Mood Mondrian (1963). Rather
than having her camera race over the structure of a painting, as she
does in Mood Mondrian, Menken allows the structure of diagonals—
their play against one another—to constitute the movement of the film.
Reminiscent, sans sound, of McLaren’s Lines Horizontal and Lines Verti-
cal (1961–62), Menken’s ‘‘Copycat’’ reveals the formalist energy of ab-
straction, commenting once again on the tabula rasa of the film screen
and pointing back at its artificial borders to the edges of its proscenium
square. She also pokes fun at the alleged symmetry of the modernist
diagonal. When repeated, diagonals copy each other endlessly, outwit-
ting each other with new juxtapositions, threatening to misalign them-
selves in asymmetrical patterns, but always moving in similar directions
and finding order next to each other.
Likewise, in ‘‘Paper Cuts,’’ Menken manipulates blue, red, and pink
forms through space so that they play off and against each other. Solidi-
fied into relationships because of their color, the pinks team up against
the blues, the blues against the reds, and so forth. Sand animation is put
to use in a way reminiscent of her earlier work in sand painting. For
example, two pink forms shove off of a silvery background (a kind of
sandy glitter), signaling a brigade of pink forms that march, in full force,
across the screen. They proceed to infect (a favorite Menken animation
ploy) a collection of what appear to be green leaflike forms. The latter
become leaves of an orange, but are then quickly deconstructed as ab-
stract forms, which fly off the screen at the end of the film.
Prefiguring the Brothers Quay’s films such as Street of Crocodiles
(1986), Menken’s ‘‘The Egg’’ is a neogothic study of a skeleton that magi-
cally acquires an egg, which comes swinging into the picture and settles
into a lower cavity of the skeleton. Then, some kind of red, gelatinous
glitter seeps into the picture frame, invades the skeletal body, and frees
the egg from its position. ≤π This sense of an entropic world where objects
infect or invade objects is a recurring theme in Menken’s animation. Her
sense of humor, however, often steps in and converts a potentially dark
scene into slapstick. In ‘‘Etcetcetc.’’ Menken is depicted hopping up and
down with two dogs on a rooftop (their seeming motion created by stop
animation). Intercuts to a busy highway or scenes whipping by from
inside a moving train are interspersed with return shots of a woman and
two dogs jumping, endlessly, up and down. At one point, the viewer is
given the point of view of one of the dogs from the roof looking down and
28 ∏ MELISSA RAGONA
observing the moving traffic of the city. The film’s absurdity is equaled
only by Hurry! Hurry! and Go Go Go , two films that are often cited as
serious masterpieces (in particular, by Brakhage). These films all exhibit
the same kind of humor as her graphic animations through ironic repeti-
tions: in the former, of racing sperm, in the latter, of frenetic urban
people.
Menken’s Notebook was not an attempt to present an unmediated,
purely autobiographical or photographic diary of the present. Seeing and
recording, the subject I and the camera eye were not collapsed into one
another. As Maureen Turim has made clear, the definition of the lyrical
film, with its ‘‘I’m behind the camera, so this is my view’’ approach,
coincides with the precepts of the autobiographical, journal-like film.≤∫
For Menken, what the camera could see was as important as what she
saw in her mind’s eye; reality and artifice were fused in Menken’s films,
which offered up often uncanny, otherworldly depictions of the mun-
dane. Menken was aware of the impossibility of this kind of filmmaking
outside the frame of a utopian project. Thus the problem that Mekas and
Brakhage faced in their efforts to present raw, immediate experience,
namely, the ‘‘intrusion of present consciousness over footage from the
past,’’ did not plague Menken. She used the time lags implicit in pop
culture and stop-motion photography as ironic signposts that pointed
more toward a tabloid consciousness (like Warhol’s) rather than to the
interior space of diary film. Unlike Mekas and Brakhage, well-meaning,
self-proclaimed chroniclers of the ‘‘truth’’ of their times, Menken was
naughty, irreverent, and willing to sacrifice the authenticity of an image
for a fabricated version which offered up a surface that might reveal more
fully the underside, the flipside of the cultural record. Mekas and Brak-
hage were fascinated by Menken, not because she represented some kind
of authentic film poetess, as they often proclaimed, but because she
registered what were, for them ‘‘heavy’’ moments in nature and urban life
in flippant, jubilant ways. As Mekas has written,
There are moments in Arabesque and in Notebook that are among the
most inspired sentences in filmic poetry. Does Menken transpose reality?
Or condense it? Or does she, simply, go direct to the essence of it? Isn’t
poetry more realistic than realism? The realist sees only the front of a
building, the outlines, a street, a tree. Menken sees in them the motion of
time and eye. She sees the motions of heart in a tree. She sees through
them and beyond them. She retains a visual memory of all that she sees.
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 29
She re-creates moments of observation, of meditation, reflection, wonder-
ment. A rain that she sees, a tender rain, becomes the memory of all rains
she ever saw; a garden that she sees becomes a memory of all gardens, all
color, all perfume, all mid-summer and sun.≤Ω
Menken’s ability to catch the ‘‘everyday,’’ a garden, a walk, a city street,
is lauded as good, avant-garde practice. She exercises a careful, sensitive
eye, a rhythmic handheld camera, and an aesthetics of low production
values (a pawned camera and natural lighting and settings). She is a
master observer, capturing the lyrical worlds of gardens (Glimpse of the
Garden), the rococo of Moorish architecture (Arabesque for Kenneth
Anger), or the abstraction of cracked sidewalks (Sidewalks ). But Menken
also had a keen sense of the art world—the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi,
the paintings of Piet Mondrian, the pop objects of Andy Warhol, and the
Fluxus-inspired sculptural toys and games of Robert Watts. As often
noted, Menken played an alcoholic mother next to Gerard Malanga in
Chelsea Girls and was a frequent visitor at Warhol’s Factory (Warhol also
visited her and Willard Maas in their Brooklyn apartment). In five of her
twenty films currently in circulation, she traces the move made in the
American art world from European modernism to abstract expression-
ism to Pop Art and Fluxus and comments in sardonic and clever ways on
the limitations and potentiality of each movement through the medium
of film.
Menken’s Camera Eye on Sculpture and Painting
‘‘Come after six to the opening,’’ she urged me, ‘‘because that’s when the
fun begins.’’ She went on to explain that it would be nightfall by then, so
that her phosphorescent paintings—some were attached to the ceiling, as
I recall—would glow in the dark when John Myers turned off the lights.
Well, she was right; it was a lot of fun. For one thing, there were untoward
goings-on in the dark and much giggling. Eventually, two policemen ar-
rived to break up the party. Excited by the prospect of a gallery that would
be devoted to what she called ‘‘fun in art,’’ Marie was full of big plans that
night for the gallery’s future, plans, as it turned out, that came to naught
when John and Tibor promptly began exhibiting the likes of Rivers, Frank-
enthaler, and Freilicher.≥π
Noguchi had already been made when Menken made her splashy debut
in the New York art world. Film, for her, would soon overtake painting
and directly inspire her rethinking of canvas, light, and object-audience
positions. Her installation-like work for the Tibor de Nagy show illus-
trates an assemblage aesthetic that predates Robert Rauschenberg’s Com-
bines of the mid-1950s. Its projection from the ceiling—across and to-
ward horizontal works on the wall—interrupts the viewer’s traditional
line of gallery vision. It also threatens, from above, the visitor’s line of
travel across the gallery floor. This emphasis on an object’s performative
potential was already evident in Noguchi, with Menken’s camera move-
ment activating the potential movement of a sculpture’s plastic lines. The
sound-image relations in Noguchi further emphasize what transformed
into the event structure of objects in later Fluxus-inspired work. There is
a playful, ironic relationship to sound as well; a goofy, low, grumbling
voice leads us into the nether areas of the sculpture (as mentioned above,
we have a sense that we are being submerged both sonically and optically).
Then, a broken neo-noir narrative punctuates the sudden twists and turns
around the sculpture. The glissando of piano parallels the glissando of
camera. An operatic voice underscores the effect of a sudden zoom.
32 ∏ MELISSA RAGONA
Menken theorized film’s relationship to painting in Dwightiana (1957),
Mood Mondrian (1963), and Drips in Strips (1963). Mood Mondrian
comes closest to repeating the strategies she uses in Noguchi; it attempts
to follow the rhythms Mondrian sets up, racing along verticals, then
cutting unexpectedly to horizontals. And though the five-and-a-half min-
ute film is silent, Menken is experimenting with ‘‘visual sound’’ or ‘‘eye
music,’’ which Brakhage would later extend and name ‘‘visual music.’’
Menken describes Mood Mondrian as ‘‘a film of a painting of a sound’’ or
‘‘visual boogie rhythm.’’ The latter most accurately captures Mondrian’s
own assessment of what he was attempting to do in this work: ‘‘The
painting might be interpreted as a representation of music, and that it is
not—my work is free from music.’’≥∫ Instead of ‘‘composition,’’ Mondrian
was interested in working with ‘‘rhythm’’ and ‘‘opposition’’ from about
1937, which was the beginning of his transatlantic painting series in which
Broadway Boogie Woogie plays a prominent role. Menken was drawn to
his work in the way she was drawn to Noguchi’s, because of its acoustic,
kinesthetic, and rhythmic explorations within the realm of the visual.
A similar tactic is used in her earlier Dwightiana (1957), except that in
addition to sound-motivated rhythmic patterns, Menken uses animation
to ‘‘move’’ the image in unexpected, novel ways. She begins this piece
with paint dripping down over blue and black title designs—these drips
will appear quite literally, again, in Drips in Strips (1963). But here paint’s
heavy gravity is juxtaposed against animation’s ephemeral agility. First,
Menken syncs each drip with a percussive stroke on a talking drum from
accompanist Teiji Ito. This opening tableau is followed by the animation
of a kaleidoscope of brightly colored objects moving over one of Dwight
Ripley’s Miro-like paintings which exude a kind of magic realist aes-
thetic (griffin-like figures move in a surreal garden). Here, as she does in
her other painting-related films, Menken comments on the use of fore-
ground and background, screen and frame, as well as 3-D versus 2-D
space. Ripley’s paintings work both as flat planes, exposed as painterly
surfaces, and as open fields in which animated objects enter or scurry
across in agitated, jazzlike patterns. Menken uses sand animation to fur-
ther decenter the picture plane of each painting, rearranging focal points
through a system of ‘‘cover up’’ and ‘‘reveal.’’ Then, objects—necklace
strands, bits of jewelry—take command and seem to be consuming their
sand background as they move across the screen. Studies of stasis versus
movement, aggregate versus solo constellations dominate the film, ac-
centuated by Teiji’s insistent music.
In Drips in Strips (1963), Menken delivers a Jackson Pollock–like slap-
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 33
stick; the viewer can see the shadow of her hand as she splatters paint
onto the filmed canvas. She delivers a version of action painting, with the
kineticism increased by the agility of the moving camera. The film opens
with black drips, then hot pink paint just dribbling down a canvas. The
camera swings from side to side, top to bottom, reverses. Close-ups of
hot pink, presented in slow motion, are surprised by sudden injections of
white and black drips, recalling the opening shot. We watch the process
of painting through the lens of the camera, each frame documenting the
density of the paint, until the final frame is completely saturated with
strips of drips.
Contrary to most critical assessments, this film illustrates not Men-
ken’s desire to paint through film, but rather her sardonic comment on
the process of painting itself. Menken described Drips in Strips as ‘‘spat-
tered paint responding to gravity, forming its own patterns and combina-
tions of color.’’≥Ω Drips in Strips has more of a relationship to the event-
inspired scores of Fluxus than to the drip canvases of abstract expression-
ist painters. Its equation drip = strip comments more on Menken’s own
replacement of painting with film, as well as on her interest in the struc-
tural possibilities of art making, a decided focus on process over content
and event over object production. Brakhage claims to have learned this
lesson from Menken, who claimed, ‘‘I was prepared to accept the far
greater reality, to the film artist, of the strip of film as opposed to the
images it makes (under certain conditions of extreme mechanization) on
the screen.’’ ∂≠
Menken’s Notebook is a testament to her agility with filmic event
structures. Her turn from abstract expressionist references to a focus on
an aesthetic of surfaces—transparency, translucence, sheen, shine, and
reflection—informed both the work of Andy Warhol, but even more
profoundly, the work of Fluxus artist Robert Watts (each of whom she
made the object of a film). As Menken herself said, ‘‘these are too tiny or
too obvious for comment’’; the raindrops, paper cuts, moon plays, night
writings, and egg games are objects from the natural world examined as if
they were extraterrestrial ephemera, emitting light, color, and humor. In
her Notebook films, a ludic volley plays itself out between the luminous
edges of nature (raindrops, the moon) and the frenetic perimeters of
urban culture (Christmas lights, neon signage). The mistaken focus on
Menken’s lyrical beauty made by Brakhage, Mekas, and MacDonald has
been well propagated, simply by a lack of information about Menken, that
her identity as a film poet of great sensitivity (especially partial to filming
gardens) has overshadowed the sardonic, witty, playful Fluxus side of
34 ∏ MELISSA RAGONA
both her animations, as well as her attempt to address the emerging
moment of an aesthetics of surface during a time when artists were still
occupied with material substance, structure, and procedural form.∂∞ Even
when Brakhage tried to typecast her as a ‘‘cinematic poet’’ arguing that
she ‘‘made a translation of poetic possibilities into the language of cin-
ema,’’ he also pointed out that she reminded him that ‘‘there is enough
English poetry to read in a lifetime, why bother with attempts at transla-
tions from other languages?’’∂≤
Embedded in Menken’s work is an explicit critique of the lyricism of
abstract expressionism, as well as any direct equations made between
poetry and film. Only in her collaboration with her husband Willard
Maas, in Geography of the Body (1943) or Image in the Snow (1950), does
she come close to articulating a Romantic poetics of film. Her work with
lights reveals a fascination with surface and emulsion rather than the
sheer poetic force of any particular subject. Like Warhol, Menken was
interested in the status of objects and their objecthood. In fact, in much
of Menken’s work, objects and subjects are given equal weight, imbued
with a structural equivalence through the material force of film.
Pop Goes the Easel: Menken Films Warhol
Filmography
Currently in Distribution
Please note: the lengths, titles, and exact dates of Menken’s films are difficult to
figure definitively. The lists below have been largely culled from the Film-
Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7 as well as from personal discussions with
P. Adams Sitney.
MARIE MENKEN ∏ 39